Susan Oliver and others: more Star Trek Wiki

“Menagerie,” 1 and 2. … Vina the dancing girl, who was painted green and caused other green-skinned women to pop up thru decades of Trek continuity, was played by Susan Oliver. Oliver’s last role appears to have been in 1988 on Freddie’s Nightmares, which was a syndicated horror anthology spun off from the Elm Street films. She appears as “a mysteriously gloomy maid who arrives at the young title character’s home and reveals herself to Judy as seemingly her own gray-haired future self. In Oliver’s final scene, she turns away from Judy and leaves the house, disappearing into the fog.” From green dancing girl to “gray-haired future self”: Hollywood has a brutal life cycle.


Memory Alpha says: “Oliver was also a passionate pilot, winner of the 1970 Powder Puff Derby air race and the fourth woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo across the Atlantic. She attempted to become the first woman to fly a single-engine plane from the United States to Moscow; she made it as far as Denmark but was denied entry into Soviet airspace. ” …    

…  A ’60s film called Codename: Heraclitus, Ricardo Montalban in the cast. 

… There’s an episode of Time Tunnel with Machiavelli “lost in time at the Battle of Gettysburg.”

 … Clint Reynolds was going to play Two Face in the campy ’60s Batman show! But it never happened. 

The episode uses footage from Trek‘s first pilot, when the cast was all different. For instance, the medical officer was John Hoyt, who went to Yale and joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. Memory Alpha: “Perhaps Hoyt’s best-remembered TV role, however, is that of Grandpa Stanley Kanisky on the Nell Carter series Gimme a Break! Hoyt joined the cast of this series in its second season in 1982 and stayed with it until its cancellation in 1987, after which he retired from acting. He passed away just four years later.”

… There’s a play called Absence of a Cello, which sounds like it could be a Peter Cook line (“The problem, glaringly,  is that no cello would appear to be involved in the operations of your string quartet.”)

Laurel Goodwin played the first of three cute yeomen whom Gene Roddenberry shoved into the series; they were meant as a starship captain’s equivalent of a good-looking secretary. The first two were rather Bambi-ish; the third (Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman Rand) was older and not played as a dipsy-doo, but she got written out pretty fast. Anyway, Goodwin quit acting at 29, and years later she and her husband somehow wound up producing a wheels-and-beer movie that starred Burt Reynolds. Wiki says the film, Stroker Ace (1983), was “a commercial and critical bomb.” To do the film Reynolds turned down the drunken-old-astronaut part Jack Nicholson took in Terms of Endearment, the role that made Nicholson a star again.

… There was a 1953 version of The Jazz Singer!

One of the aliens (“Talosians”) in the episode’s first-pilot footage also played Cousin Itt in The Addams Family. … Here’s a guy who played a spare Starfleet officer. I think his face looks like it was drawn in the manner of Dan Clowes’s Lloyd Llewellyn, retro-’50s phase.


Elisha Cook Jr., Earl Grant Titsworth, others; or, The Star Trek Wiki tour continues


“Galileo VII.” 


…  There is a 1964 movie called Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’. … The black ensign guest-starred on Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant. Nichelle Nichols also did a Lieutenant guest spot, and something tells me it was the same episode. The two definitely co-starred in Great Gettin’. Later he was a reg on Land of the Giants. … Celia Lovsky and Mark Lenard, who both played Vulcan elders on Star Trek, also appeared in The Greatest Story Ever Told. … The woman who played the yeoman in “Galileo VII” now “sells recreational vehicle lots in Palms Spring, California.” … One of the episode’s extras, a 35-ish blueshirt, died in a motorcycle accident two years later. His real name was Earl Grant Titsworth, but for credits he used “Grant Woods” and “Grant Lockwood.”


“Court Martial.”

… The base commander is the “first black actor to play a flag officer on Star Trek,” per Mem Channel. Afro-Portuguese, born in Montreal, the St.-Henri district. The actor, Percy Rodriguez, was a Peyton Place reg for the show’s last season: “A Doctor’s Role for Negro Actor,” the LA Times said in a headline. He narrated the trailer for Jaws, and when he was 89 he came out of retirement to narrate the trailer for a documentary about Jaws-the-phenomenon, The Shark Is Still Workin’. (Wiki says he was interviewed for the film and the interview was his last appearance.) … 

… Cogley the lawyer was Elisha Cook Jr., of course — Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon. To tell the truth, I didn’t think his Cogley was that good; he really did not sell the “Books, Captain! Books!” speech. But he does have a nice moment as the charges are being read out and he frowns down at his elbow in an impatient, manly way. (Here‘s Mem Alpha.)

From Wiki:  “He lived in Bishop, California, typically summering on Lake Sabrina in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” Wiki quotes John Huston: “[Cook] lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films. When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat.” …

Joan Marshall played the prosecutor/Kirk old flame. She did a lot of TV work from 1958 to the late ’60s, then married Hal Ashby. Her last film was Shampoo (1975), which Ashby directed, but her part doesn’t make the Wiki cast list. (Mem Channel here.)

Star Trek actors in wiki: married to David Ogden Stiers


“Miri.” … The girl in the title was supposed to be 12 or 13, but the actress was 19. A few years later she played the girl in True Grit, who was supposed to be 14. She got married five times. “After she starred in True Grit, film critics predicted that she was at the beginning of a long career as a great actress. In fact, she has made almost no films of note since.”  Still, she was John Cusack’s mom in Better Off Dead (1985); David Ogden Stiers played her husband. … Michael J. Pollard played the teen who was stirring up trouble among the kids. But he was 27. I give his name because I never saw True Grit but I did see Bonnie and Clyde, where he played the second second banana, right after Gene Hackman. He got a Supporting Actor nom for that, not bad. One of his later films was Melvin and Howard (1980).


With a face like Pollard’s, a real pulped masterpiece of boyish oddity, you’d think he would have been all over the place, in any goofy-guy role that came up, and it appears that he did at least work. … One of the little kids, a kid with an army helmet that has a net on it, is the son of Greg Morris, who was a Mission: Impossible regular. This same kid grew up and played Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld. … There’s a movie called Homeboys in Space. … One of Roddenberry’s daughters has a former schoolmate named the Rev. Peggy Pearl-Kirkby.


“Conscience of the King.”  The villain, Alto Karidian, is played by a guy who did Shakespeare from the 1930s to the late ’50s, then started doing Hollywood. His son helped start Sesame Street. … The character’s daughter, or the actress playing her, was voted Miss Memphis in high school and went on to do okay as a cool-blond type on tv. For instance, she played the police-woman sidekick on Ironsides, a crime-drama vehicle that ran for years (Raymond Burr’s in a wheelchair and he solves crimes). In the 1980s and ’90s “she worked frequently as a costume designer for a number of B movies.” Her first season of Ironsides, she had won an Emmy for best supporting actress. …

There was an episode of Mission: Impossible called “Cocaine” and it guest-starred William Shatner.  … Great movie title: Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street. … The guy playing one of the ensigns is a Canadian doo-wop singer and “co-wrote the theme song for the hit TV series The Fall Guy.” 

Special notice: Bruce Hyde, a long-faced, distinctive guy in his 20s who was charming as the goofy Irish ensign, Lt. Riley. He showed up here and in “Naked Time” (he was the guy driving Kirk nuts by singing). Wiki just says he wound up teaching at St. Cloud State in Minnesota. Memory Alpha fills in this: Hyde did 9 tv guest shots in 13 months, then played Hair in San Francisco and was converted by his role into being an actual hippie. “I was going to get a Volkswagen bus and a big bag of brown rice and go find God. And that’s what I did.” Then he got his doctorate and now he’s chairman of Theater, Film Studies and Dance at St. Cloud. To me that’s not a bad way for things to work out.

… as Kevin Riley

Traces of greatness among old Wiki actors


Who am I kidding? Nobody’s going to link to this shit. But yeah, the last batch was here.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of.” Sherry Jackson. Wiki says Jackson “is probably best remembered today for her role as Terry Williams on The Danny Thomas Show (AKA Make Room for Daddy) from 1953–58.” According to Star Trek associate producer Robert Justman, the sight of Jackson in costume caused William Shatner to sweat and become crosseyed (though I don’t have the book at hand, so maybe memory exaggerates). 


“Dagger of the Mind.” The mad scientist was played by James Gregory, the guy who played Inspector Luger in Barney Miller! (And also the dopey McCarthyite/Communist pawn Sen. Johnny Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate!) He was an excellent comic actor, so good he made you glad the tv was on, but in “Dagger” he played a straight villain and anyway the episode is a real snooze.



Marianna Hill. She’s credited in Godfather II as “Deanna Dunn-Corleone,” which I think would make her the shiksa (or whatever the term would be for a shiksa equivalent in the Italian frame of reference) who married Fredo and then got too friendly with Troy Donahue. If so, she delivered a great little comic performance. (“Never marry an Italian! They treat their women like shit!”) 

Old actors from Wikipedia, “Mudd’s Women” edition

Last batch here.

“Mudd’s Women.” Roger C. Carmel, who played Harry Mudd, “was also the voice of Smokey Bear in fire safety advertisements, as well as Decepticon lieutenant Cyclonus in the popular Transformers animated series.” (update, In comments, Joe S. Walker adds that Carmel also appeared “in one of the worst films of all time, Myra Breckenridge.”)


Of the three women Harry Mudd brings aboard the Enterprise, one was played by Karen Steele, who “reportedly earned her first money by spearing baby sharks in the private cove on the estate of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.” In 1970 she lost her agent because she turned down being a regular on a tv series and instead went on a morale tour of Pacific service hospitals. This was during Vietnam. That year she said, “A lot of people in this town just don’t understand me. … They don’t believe me when I tell them I’d rather spend 17 hours talking to General Westmoreland than exchanging amenities at some Hollywood party.”   

Another, Susan Denberg, was “Playmate of the Month” in the August 1966 issue of Playboy. During the late 1960s she had drug problems: “I became hooked on LSD and marijuana … I needed LSD every day, almost every hour…” I don’t think that’s really possible.

Ted Cassidy, Eddie Paskey … it’s more first season Star Trek actors in Wiki

Jesus, there’s a lot of this stuff. … Memory Alpha is a bit of a millstone; it’s more than doubled how much I have to read.

Ah well. Last batch here

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” … Ted Cassidy. He was huge and odd looking, so he played aliens and monsters (like Lurch in The Addams Family). But he started as a radio personality in Dallas, where he did on-the-scene reporting about JFK’s death: 


On November 22, 1963, shortly after the John F. Kennedy assassination, Cassidy interviewed several of the witnesses, including two very close witnesses, William and Gayle Newman, after the Newmans had appeared on WFAA-TV, but before they left to go to the Dallas Sheriff’s office (no tape exists of that interview for the radio station did not start recording their broadcasts until about 1:45 PM). He also interviewed the manager of his radio station who was in the Book Depository and saw a man run out of the building shortly after the shooting. The manager offered several times to talk to Dallas police who repeatedly refused to interview him.


In 1978 he voiced the Thing on the cartoon Fantastic Four! And the opening narration for The Incredible Hulk. “He also co-wrote the screenplay of 1973’s The Harrad Experiment, in which he made a brief appearance.” The Harrad Experiment is about a college where all the kids get it on as part of progressive education.

Also from “What Are,” a credit for Eddie Paskey, “a U.S. actor primarily known for his role as ‘Lieutenant Leslie’, a redshirt, on Star Trek, in which he is noted for being the most omnipresent actor with the fewest got i spoken lines during the entire series. He appeared in 57 episodes.”

Paskey got into pictures when he was discovered pumping gas in the Pacific Palisades. He kept working at the station on weekends while doing tv guest spots, then quit show business in the late ’60s and “went into business for himself in Santa Ana, California, [eventually] owning and operating an auto-detailing service called The Air Shop with his wife Judy. He sold the business in 2004. Today, he and Judy, along with their 1955 T-Bird, and are members of Hot Rods Unlimited, a SoCal auto club.

First Season Wiki: more old Star Trek actors

All right, I got done with the second season. Because my planning is fucked up, I now start on the first season.
Note:  Just came across a site called Memory Alpha, a wiki devoted to Star Trek. Good design and a lot of info, though the material below is all from regular Wikipedia.

“Charlie X”: Robert Walker Jr. was the son of Jennifer Jones. She left his father for David O. Selznick when Walker was three or so, and a year later she won Best Actress for Song of Bernadette. … The character actor Abraham Sofaer’s wife was named Psyche Angela Christian. 

“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot … Gary Lockwood did a 1968 caper film called They Came to Rob Las Vegas. In 1978 he did a made-for-tv movie called The Incredible Journey of Dr. Meg Laurel. … Sally Kellerman. She wound up as Rodney Dangerfield’s love interest in Back to School (1986). Yikes. … Paul Carr “toured in summer stock with Chico Marx.” His character dies in “Where No Man,” and Wiki says that more or less makes him the first dead redshirt, though none of the uniforms in the episode were actually red. … Paul Fix played the ship doctor but was replaced for the rest of the series by DeForest Kelley. In 1972 the two of them wound up in the same lousy, career-nadir horror film, Night of the Lepus, which was about “giant mutant rabbits” in the Southwest.
“The Naked Time.” There’ an episode of Trapper John, M.D. called “Old Man Liver” and it was written by a bit player in this episode. … The guy who played Amorous Crewman voiced a role in Akira.
“Balance of Terror.” Back in 1932, RKO did a movie called Secrets of the French Police.